Development of Comprehension and Comprehension of Development

- / -

Part 8 of Development
through Alternation. Augmented version of a paper
originally prepared for Integrative Working Group B of the Goals, Processes
and Indicators of Development (GPID) project of the Human and Social Development
Programme of the United Nations University (UNU). This document was originally
distributed as a separate monograph in 1983. The paper provides a structure
linking reviews of alternation as it emerges in studies from a wide range of
sources. The paper is in 9 separate parts
[searchable PDF version]

The authors of the preceding five sections (Stamps, Rescher, Bohm, Dossey,
and Rudhyar) each argue for an alternative to Cartesian/Newtonian frameworks
as a necessary condition for any adequate approach to perceived complexity.
The need to elaborate a strong argument for such an alternative in each case
obscures the author's explicit recognition of the continuing need for a Cartesian/Newtonian
framework under certain conditions. The two alternatives may even
be viewed as complementary in the full sense of the term (161), necessitating
an alternation between them.

The first unsatisfactory feature of these presentations is that they do
not go
far enough in showing how the alternatives can be interwoven in order to be of
practical relevance to the present crisis in human and social development.
Thus Stamps, although acknowledging the bicameral nature of mind, uses a
classical taxonomic framwork as a vehicle for his arguments for holonomy, and
discusses "networking" in an unrelated book. Rescher stresses the local
significance of Euclidean hierarchical structuring, but does not offer more
than
the recognition that the complexities of any global pattern can be viewed as a
"chain-mail structure" (91, p. 202), otherwise known as the
"fish-scale"
structure of knowledge. Bohm provides
graphic examples of the unfoldment
and enfoldment of explicate forms in relation to the implicate order, but
(although he idscusses its relevance to consciousness) it is not his purpose to
show how such perception can be applied concretely in human and social
organizations. Dossey avoids discussion
of the interface between implicate and
explicate therapy and of the nature of the framework in terms of which any
decision to use one or the other would be made, namely the art of alternating
between them. Rudhyar avoids the
nature of the thinking required to alternate
between tonality and syntonic perspectives, and what that implies for social
organization.

Given the incompatible, but complementary, natures of the alternatives
with
which each of these authoris is dealing, it seems necessary to focus more
clearly on the structure and dynamics of any "marriage" between such
alternatives. How is any such marriage
brought about and how does it "work"
in practice? It does not seem to be
sufficient to switch in an unmediated
manner between sophisticated Euclidean taxonomies and sprawling associative
networks (Stamps and Rescher) or between their process equivalents (Bohm and
Dossey). The abyss separating them in
practice invites the chaotic
ineffectiveness and abuse which is characteristic of present conceptual and
organizational dilemmas and of operation "schizophrenia". In any "marriage"
such a situation is associated with abusive "sexual politics". The either/or
nature of the switch is in itself an essentially Cartesian trap.

A step towards concretizing the implications of any such marriage can be
explored
firstly in structural terms. The problem can be defined as how to design
(or
comprehend) a marraige between "hierarchy" and "network" so
that the union
constitutes a whole of greater significance than the "incompatible"
so that the union
constitutes a whole of greater significance than the "incompatible"
parts. This
problem has been explored elsewhere (97, 93, 99) in the light of the tensegrity
(tensional integrity) structures discussed by Buckminster Fuller (46) and
subsequent
authors (116, 117). The problem is
essentially one of fitting hierarchy into network.
This can be done such that the local advantages of hierarchy are melded into
the
global advantages of network. In this
way the local weakness of network and the
global weaknesses of hierarchy are counteracted. The large range of tensegrity
structures (116) may then be viewed as indications of possible patterns of processes
within a whole.

The special significance of tensegrity structures as "denk
modelle" lies in the way
they reflect and combine realistically the continuity
of network and the discontinuity
of hierarchy. The strong
"constraining" bonds of hierarchy are interlinked by the
weaker "restraining" bonds of network as in the reality of social
organization. The
two types of structural element, if appropriately interrelated, bring about the
emergence of an entirely new structural system, with dynamic self-stabilizing
and
load distribution properties of a unique kind. Of great significance, when they take a
spherical form, is the fact that the centre is unoccupied by any structural
element. It
becomes a vital point of reference for the global
characteristics, but is defined solely
by the manner in which the local
structural elements are configured around it.

Although physical models of tensegrity structures can be built (and
effectively
underlie the construction of large-scale geodesic domes), a criticism that has
been
made of their potential significance as models of psycho-social organization is
that
they are too symmetrical and complete, and thus are not open to any further
development. This criticism is valid if
psycho-social organization is modelled by one
such tensegrity structure only, as it is also if organization is modelled
by a particular
hierarchical or network pattern. But
there are many such tensegrity structures, even
in the spherical form. Each such
structure may then be considered as a possible
alternative. The process of development
from one to another, or of the alternation
between them, then models the potential richness of psycho-social organization
more
effectively. There are many
transformation pathways between them (46).

The set of such alternative structures, between which alternation takes
place, may be
more clearly understood in the light of the theory of resonance. Johan Galtung first
explored the possibility of using the organization of chemical molecules to
clarify the
description of social organization (118).
He dealt with fixed structures and not with
the transition between alternatives.
The theory of resonance in chemistry is
concerned with the representation of the actual normal state of molecules by a
combination of several alternative "resonable" structures, rather
than by a single
valence-bond structure. The molecule
is then conceived as resonating among the
several valence-bond structures, or rather to have a structure that is a resonance
hybrid of these structures.

The classic example of a resonance hybrid is the benzene molecule of 6
carbon
atoms for which F A Kekule introduced the idea of oscillation between two
alternative structures (Fig. 1: A and B).
The pattern of oscillation was later
extended by Linus Pauling to include three more alternates (Fig. 1: C, D and
E). The actual configuration is a
resonance hybrid of the five forms, which
through quantum mechanics has been shown to have an energy less than any of
the alternate structures. This is
potentially of great significance for any
social structure analogue, in view of the call for a low-energy society (see
below).

Such structures recall the context of Bohm's arguments (above)
concerning
unfoldment of explicate forms. The
wave function representing a stationary
state of the resonance hybrid in quantum mechanics can be expressed as the
sum of the wave functions that correspond to several hypothetical alternates.

The proper combination is that sum which leads to a minimal energy for
the
system (#7). Of significance in any
social structure analogue is that the
higher energy of each alternate is associated with some degree of
"distortion"
(different in kind in each case), which effectively renders the alternate
rneta-stable (#8). Whilst the value of
using such tensegrity or resonance
models may be contested, they do have the advantage of shifting the debate,
currently somewhat sterile, to a level at which the merits of particular
answers
are no longer the sole issue. They
open the way to more fruitful discussions
both about how alternation between the opposing
answers characteristic of a
complex society can be improved and about the kinds of social structures that
could be based upon such patterns of alternation.

8.2 Non-comprehension as a structuring phenomenon in
a learning society

In a learning society, in which no one can aspire to be informed of
every item
of significance, it is quite unrealistic to expect ignorance and
non-comprehension to have a purely minor role, hopefully to be further
diminished by development programmes and information technology. Whether
it be between the preoccupations of disciplines, cultures, generations, levels
of
education, or temperamental preferences, non-comprehension must necessarily
continue to play a major role in the ordering of society, if not a
progressively
increasing one. The inability to
respond to the minimal educational needs of
developing countries is a striking example of the problem, matched by recent
evidence of the increasing ineffectiveness of the sophisticated education
programmes in developed countries.
There are practical limits to
learning,
some of which have been explored elsewhere (81) in a critical review of the
recent UNESCO-endorsed report to the Club of Rome "No Limits to
Learning"
(44).

This is the second reason for which the investigations of integration in
the previous chapter by Stamps, Rescher, Bohm, Dossey, and Rudhyar are unsatisfactory.
They do not recognize the wider social structuring effects of a person's inability
to comprehend any more "seductive" answer. It is assumed that
with some minimum of explanation comprehension will necessarily result and
the person will switch from Cartesian to non-Cartesian, from linear to non-linear,
as providing the only "reasonable" mode of comprehension. It is
assumed that people can be provided with the educational context within which
this transition can be facilitated. This is not the case, perhaps fortunately.
Available resources do not permit such education on more than a limited scale,
but more importantly, people have other agendas to which their concepts of
human and social development are linked. It is through this process that
the variety of the psycho-social system is protected from homogenizing tendencies,
however benevolently initiated.

The structuring effect of non-comprehension in complex organizations is most
clearly seen through q-analysis as discussed by Ron Atkin (above). One interesting
feature of this is the effect of the forces to which an individual is subject
by exposure to something which is not fully comprehended, especially when
the non-comprehension is not consciously recognized, or is disguised by satisfaction
with a superficial explanation. In a sense, recalling Dossey's arguments,
the comprehension of an individual creates the spacetime geometry within which
he functions (in Atkin's terms), whereas his non-comprehension determines
the nature of the forces to which he is subject within that geometry (again
in Atkin's terms).

The difficulty in engendering a more healthy approach to non-comprehension,
as a phenomenon in which everyone participates, is that it is still treated
as something to be disguised or denied, whether to oneself or to others.
Or, perhaps worse, it is treated as something that can be eliminated by some
kind of educational "fix" (a course, a tape, a book, etc.), or acknowledged
with pride as something one does not need, or have time, to know.

It is for such reasons that Christopher Alexander, an architect/designer,
is helpful in demonstrating that the central "quality without a name",
which makes any context attractive to be in, can only be "tangentially"
described in terms of a range of possible aspects:

"There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and
spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective
and precise, but it cannot be named." (36)

He shows how the nature of this central quality is not encompassed by any
of the following attributes, each with its special advocates: alive, whole,
comfortable, free, exact, egoless, eternal (36, pp. 25-40)

For Alexander, in order to define this quality, it is necessary to recognize
that every context is given its character by certain patterns of events that
keep on happening there. By arguing that these patterns are always interlocked
with certain geometric patterns which structure any inhabited space, Alexander
effectively provides a concretization of Atkin's insights relating to organization
space (35). Both are intimately linked to the process of development:

"The specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may
be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces
loose, and set us free; but when they are dead, they keep us locked in inner
conflict. The more living patterns there are in a place...the more it comes
to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining
force which is the quality without a name" (36, p. )

It is interesting that by defining the central quality as nameless, Alexander
frees it from the problems, encountered earlier, of the essential inadequacy
of any particular language. The quality is "defined" as not comprehensible
through any one such language. As such it is totally in sympathy with the
nature of Bohm's holomovement, by which such "names" are engendered.

Using the spherical tensegrity model, each such language is characterized
by (explicate) surface features or patterns of the tensegrity which encompass
a central empty space without occupying it. Using the resonance model, each
attribute is an alternative in the pattern of alternation, but the nameless
core quality is represented by the resonance hybrid. In Atkin's terms, the
central quality functions as a higher dimensional q-hole which engenders a
pattern of communication amongst the perspectives or languages configures
around it.

The "New Global Order" called for by the crisis of the times may
be thought of as brought into being by recognition of the fundamental distinction
between local, specific, surface features (centres, values, languages, groupings,
etc.) and the unoccupied common centre whose position is determined by the
pattern of all such specialized features constellated around it. It is the
very pattern of harmonies and dissonances between these local features which
can then engender the space of which the unoccupied centre is the focal reference
point. This can only occur if the mutual rejection of those most strongly
opposed is contained, by allowing them appropriate- separation, and is thus
itself used to maintain the form of the pattern.

These considerations clarify ways of thinking about any "meta-answer"
and show the essential role of non-comprehension in structuring the space
for the nameless quality of life which development programmes try in their
different ways to enhance. The meta-answer is thus a resonance hybrid of
answers based on particular conceptual languages or epistemologies. Development
of that quality of life calls for the dynamics of resonance between answers
or frameworks despite the conceptual discontinuity that this involves. The
languages used above by different authors (in chapter 4, for example) clarify
the strengths and weaknesses of particularly approaches in endeavouring to
encompass this quality. In a sense the essential feature of this paper is
the search for ways to alternate between the insights of each such language
and thus engender some understanding of the nature of the resonance hybrid
they form.

In order to give more practical significance to these considerations, further
work is required to show, in the light of the insights of Dossey and Atkin,
what kinds of spacetime geometries a person (or group) may create for himself
through his mode of comprehension and through the "valencies" of
the nodes in his pattern of communication. Much of relevance to such an investigation
is implicit in Fuller's "geometry of thinking" (46), and explicit
in Atkin's work (72, 74). Atkin especially clarifies the structuring effect
of interactions between groups "living on different geometries".
Fuller clarifies the transformations between configurations. But each such
language must always be recognized as limited.

Another way to think about this question is in terms of "conceptual
gearboxes". Use of a
single-answer mode of comprehension is similar to the
use of the first gear on an automobile, with ail its advantages and
disadvantages. Modes of comprehension
corresponding to alternation patterns
between two, three, or more, such languages, are then similar to second and
higher gears. The problem is then one
of improving the design of such
gearboxes and learning how to use them.
For the difficulty at the moment is
that individually and collectively we tend to get "stuck" in a
particular
Conceptual gear, and are unable to "shift" up or down according to
the needs of
the moment. This approach is explored
in a separate paper (122).

The disadvantage of the gearbox model is highlighted by a "woven
basket" or
"birdcage" model in the same paper (22). The structural features of a spherical
tensegrity may be considered as indicating the different functions active in a
viable whole (99). What remains to be
determined is what degree of functional
differentiation is appropriate under what circumstances. A viable pattern of
functions bears a strong resemblance to a viable basketweave pattern with its
counter-balancing properties integral to the structure - hence the notion of
"functional basketweaving".
In this sense it has yet to be recognized that the
psycho-social world is "functionally round" rather than "flat"
as many seem to
assume. Considered as a
"birdcage", the problem is to interweave functions in
such a way as to construct an environment for the essential living quality (of
Alexander) which cannot otherwise be "kept alive" by the gross and
devitalizing
concepts so widely employed by programme designers.

An even more dynamic model emerges from the possibility that conceptual
processes can be usefully conceived as engaged in a "pumping
action". A
"conceptual pump" (as in the respiratory cycle) involved
transformation of
attention processes through a single category, to a polar category set, to an
N-category set, and back again -
corresponding to the movement from
principles to details. (Buckminster
Fuller argues strongly in support of the
fundamental significance of topological equivalent he describes, namely the
vector equilibrium "jitterbug".)
Problems in the pumping cycle can arise when
the pump locks onto a set of a particular number, as is evident in many
conceptual systems. Problems also arise
when, for example, the single
category set is projected onto some detailed feature of the environment,
effectively reversing the action of the pump.

8.3 Learning cycles

The approach to learning discussed is too basic for it to be possible to
derive
much of significance that can be applied directly to organizations. The
problem lies in the Western bias discussed earlier in favour of a learning
"zigzag" in an essential linear
direction. If the zigzag is
considered as occuring
around a learning cycle however,
marrying in the Eastern bias towards
recurrence, this cycle can then be subdivided into sufficiently detailed
elements to be of significance for organizational operations. Jantsch discusses
cyclical organization in terms of the system logic of dissipative
self-organization:

"Hypercycles, which link autocatalytic units in cyclical organization,
play an important role in many natural phenomena of self-organization, spanning
a wide spectrum from chemical and biological evolution to ecological and economic
systems and systems of population growth. The cyclical organization of a
system may itself evolve if autocatalytic participants mutate or new processes
become introduced. The co-evolution of participants in a hypercycle leads
to the notion of an ultracycle which generally underlies every learning process."
(21, p. 15)

The question then becomes how many discontinuous phases (Jantsch's "participants")
it is useful to distinguish in the cycle. Too few and the incompatibilities
between them are too fundamental, too many and the distinctions between them
are too subtle. The operational significance of this conceptual constraint
has been explored in earlier papers from which it is apparent that significance
is lost if more than about 7 categories are used (43), unless the total breaks
down into sub-sets based on simple (e.g. 2, 3, 5) factors (23).

A novel approach to the learning cycle in relation to action has been taken
by Arthur Young (70) as a consequence of his experience as the inventor of
the Bell helicopter (whose three-dimensional movement is notoriously difficult
to control - as with the development process). He establishes the vital
learning-action link through a new interpretation of the operational significance
of the set of 12 "measure formulae" through which material
phenomena are observed, acted upon and controlled in physics and engineering.
Of special interest for the development theme is the significance he attaches
to the sequence of movement around the cycle: one direction involving essentially
unremernbered experience-without-learning, the other involving conscious learning-action.
As briefly presented here (see Table 2 and Diagram 5), his approach has been
adapted and modified to further emphasize the action-learning significance
(#9). It is interesting that the philosopher Stephane Lupasco also attaches
importance to the analysis of such measures in terms of the polarities they
constitute and the types of energy with which they are associated (147, p.
26).

Inspection of this example clarifies how portions of such a cycle are
vulnerable to institutionalization (as specialized, independent answer
domains, or habitual responses) to the extent that there is no learning bridge
across the discontinuities. The problem of (social) integration is thus intimately
related to the functioning of (collective) learning cycles (#10). It seems
probable that needs (and their satisfiers) also relate to different
portions of such cycles, as would ranges of incompatible development goals
or alternative visions of desirable futures. In each case the point
to be emphasized is that such seemingly incompatible fragments are "frozen"
portions of a cycle with which individuals or groups identify. None
are of lasting significance in their own right, especially insofar as they
hinder the collective learning process which must take place through them.

The facilitative and obstructive factors to further learning (i.e. successful
"struggle" in marxist terms) at each stage in the cycle are probably
linked to patterns of complementarity and incompatibility between the stages
according to their membership of (2, 3, or 4-member) sub-sets in the cycle
(e.g. preceding and succeeding stages in the cycle are in conflictual relationship
since they would correspond to thinking of the opposite hemisphere). Answers
given from any part of a cycle are of course "questionable" as perceived
from other parts of the cycle.

As noted earlier, a single cycle is not a sufficiently concrete
representation of the complexity to be encompassed by an adequate meta-answer.
Where several cycles interlock to form a sphere, the nodes are effectively
combinations of cyclic phases. The relationships of challenge and harmony
between such nodes have been discussed in earlier papers (97, 98, 99) concerning
Fuller's tensegrity concept (46).It is this which clarifies the
potential and vulnerability of networking (1, 100) as an essentially
right hemisphere mode of organization which needs to be more "seductively"
married to the much-criticized left-hemisphere, hierarchical mode.

The acid test of learning cycles however, is whether they can encompass
the
discontinuities between the major political tendencies by which the world
community
is seemingly divided. Any such
relationship posited must necessarily be highly
controversial, but the controversy should be patterned according to the aspects
of the
learning challenges involved. As an
exercise (in oversimplification) therefore, the
12-phase cycle has been collapsed to a 4-phase cycle, with portions of which
the
major political answer domains have been tentatively identified (see Diagram
6).
Note that collapsing any cycle to this degree overloads each phase with
significance
so that any label effectively becomes a caricature of the multi-facetted
reality
associated with that phase.

Positions on each axis distant from the origin are here interpreted as
indicating more
extreme manifestations of the phase characteristics. The learning cycles within
each
phase are then effectively represented by distorted (elliptical)
"cycles" in which other
phases are "repressed" or "inadequately expressed". The range of elliptical shapes can
be used to distinguish varieties of political tendencies sharing the same basic
axis
(#11). A somewhat related diagram
(Diagram 7) can be used to highlight the problem
of asymptotic convergence on a meta-answer.
The axes represent right- and
left-hemisphere thinking, with other equivalent dichotomies collapsed into
them. The
diagonal therefore reflects practical positions of balance between them, namely
viable compromises between structure and process, for example (#12).

Some answer domains have tentatively been located on the necessarily
oversimplified
diagram in an approximate manner. A
distinction is made between the answer as
expressed in theory, doctrine, or public claims (subscript D), and the answer
as it
tends to manifest in practice (subscript
P) faced with nasty decisions due to the
consequences of its own limitations or impracticality. It would appear that the
diagonal serves as a kind of "mirror" in that "D" answers
are "rotated" about it into a
corresponding "P" position when they are implemented and their
negative features are
experienced by others.

This would accord with the concept of the "repressed" or
"inadequate" features of an
answer being brought to light under such conditions. In Jungian terms, the "P" answer
is the unconscious "shadow"
(78, pp. 210-243) of the
"D" answer. The "third
perspective" is located on the diagonal, but the more ideal the practical
combination
of structure and process sought, the more "inaccessible" it is along
the diagonal (#13).

Indicating 4 phases characteristic
of extreme policy options with the destabilizing dilemmas to which each
is vulnerable The cycles associated with particular political strategies
are indicated tentatively as "eliptically distorted" orbits with
eccentricity and orientation according to the degree to which they embody
the extreme policy phases. (Note the relationship to the constraints on
movement of a steering "joy stick".) Larger orbits indicate strategies
of greater scope which internalize a broader range of the lear ing processes
to which society is subject. This approach could be used to distinguish
between various "brands" of socialism, for example. Note that
the shape of eccentric orbits could be used as an indicator of the relative
amount of recognition accorded to corrective policies required at each stage
in order to maintain a stable orbit. An orbital dynamics model also opens
a new perspective on the problems of transitions between strategies. Orbital
overlap could also be used to indicate the degree of shared strategic concern.

"Left-hemisphere" includes:
hierarchical order, controlled participation, structure-oriented, form-oriented,
efficiency/effectiveness, as well as dimensions associated with such symbols
as yang, thanatos, and Apollonian. It also implies sufficient complexity
to contain variety. "Right-hemisphere" includes: associative, participative,
process-oriented, content-oriented, aesthetic, as well as dimensions associated
with such symbols as yin, eros, and Dionysian. It also implies sufficient
simplicity to be comprehensible readily as a gestalt. Note that percentions
of positions after effective implementation in practice (subscript P) are
displaced through the diagonal "mirror" from their positions as
portrayed in theory or by advocate propaganda.

8.4 Patterns of alternation: a musical key from a political
philosopher

Given the essential discontinuity between the domains in a pattern of alternation,
the key question is whether there is any way of comprehending and communicating
the nature of the transformations between the elements in the pattern, other
than "superficially" in purely right-hemisphere (dramatic) terms.
Furthermore, it would be useful to clarify the basis for the emergence of
each domain within the pattern. A recent study by Ernest McClain, a musicologist,
demonstrates that the "father" of political philosophy, Plato, has
further unexplored insights to offer concerning these matters, especially
in view of his aesthetic concerns (which correspond to Attali's requirement).
McClain points out that great care must be taken in exploring Plato's political
allegories because of his considerable use of puns metaphor and humour as
a form of presentation appropriate for arguments comprehensible to
a musically and mathematically informed audience. It is appropriate to follow
Mcclain's lead because he draws attention to a language which can be used
to clarify the nature of alternation.

McClain demonstrates with considerable musico-mathematical precision how
Plato conceived four very different tuning systems whose characteristics he
described through the four different communities (Callipolis, Ancient Athens,
Atlantis, Magnesia) which are the subject of his later dialogues. As McClain
says, they are:

"each vividly, presented but each necessarily "sacrificed"
to let the alternatives come into view. This mode of thinking, or manner
of talking, is appropriate for the realm of alternative aesthetic structures
which are equally appealing - from one point of view or another - but
mutually incompatible in time. Not only do Plato's musical cities come to
be, but each must pass away - as each tone, each mode, each rhythm must pass
- to allow the next to come into focus. There is no dialogue which "fixes"
Plato's thought for us. The Republic and Laws are so opposed
in spirit - the first proposing a communal brotherhood with few laws and
common wives, children and property, the second satiated with law and central
government - as to appear to be the work of two different men....Plato is
in no sense what we have come to understand as a "Platonist".
Neither is he a Pythagorean. His Pythagoreanism is but a prelude
to philosophy, to "the song itself...which dialectic performes",
a prelude to which Platonists have declined to listen, although it establishes
the multiple perspectives from which Plato understood himself." (31,
p. 132-3)

The constrants and possibilities of developing a tuning system within which
harmonies and discords can play themselves out allows McClain to demonstrate,
using Plato's material:

limitation: "In political theory as in musical theory, both
creation and the limitation of creation pose a central problem. Threatening
infinity must be contained. Conflicting and irreconcilable systems...must
be coordinated as an alternative to chaos. Limitation, preferably
self-limitation, is one of Plato's foremost concerns" (31,
p. 1 4) "The political lesson - a musical analogue - points to
the impossibility of founding a lasting state on any model which lacks an
internal principle of self-limitation..." (31, p. 19??)

inevitability of degeneration: McClain demonstrates how the expansion
of any system, musical or political, leads to its degeneration. Plato's
well-known theory, concerning the transition between five kinds of ruler,
through aristocracy to tyranny, whilst no longer of interest in those terms,
acquires new relevance as a metaphor in the light of McClain's analysis

just distribution in practice: Plato provides a unique response
to the central problem of how a whole is to be divided up into parts which
can be harmoniously related. The musical language he uses clarifies the
impossibility of achieving the ideal solution to this problem, whether
in music or in social systems. The many possible tuning systems model
the variety of "intuitive" approximations to this solution
(#14). The best approximation is achieved by "tempering", namely
through a slight deformation of the ideal distribution amongst the parts,
in order to achieve harmony within the whole. As McClain demonstrates,
the Republic is from a musician's point of view a treatise on equal
temperament, namely on the ways of approaching the fundamental musical problem
arising from the incommensurability of certain musical intervals.
In Plato's terms justice does not mean giving each man "exactly what
he is owed" but rather moderating such demands in the interests of
"what is best for the city" (31, pp. 5 and 55). His communities
model tuning systems which achieve this with different advantages and disadvantages
to the quality of the whole and to that of the parts. But what is important
here is not the models but the language which interrelates these possibilities.

dialectics of opposites: The language used requires, and embodies,
a critical process of turning back to examine anything that has been assumed.
"It is this turning back to criticize one's initial assumptions which
separates Plato from all philosophy developed from "first principles"...No
assumption we can make...makes any sense until we have "turned back"
to study them also from the opposite point of view" (31, p. 8 and
33).

McClain's analysis provides a much richer understanding of how and why alternatives
may be distinguished, and of how the sets of categories may be derived by
which a "seductive" pattern of functions (or institutions) is defined.
It shows the need for sufficient variety to "contain" or "carry"
interesting harmony, but marks the emergence of various limits necessary for
the integrity of the system. But although the pattern of alternatives clarifies
the nature of the required container, the art of choosing and moving between
them remains (delightfully) elusive, as pointed out in a study (30) of Vedic
musically-encoded philosophy to which McClain refers in an earlier work:

"Language grounded in music is grounded thereby on context dependency;
any tone can have any possible relation to other tones, and the shift from
one tone to another, which alone makes melody possible, is a shift in perspective
which the singer himself embodies. Any perspective (tone) must be "sacrificed"
for a new one to come into being; the song is a radical activity which requires
innovation while maintaining continuity, and the "world" is the
creation of the singer, who shares its dimensions with the song."

In this sense much can be learnt from current interest in "techniques"
of improvisation in music groups in which each instrument is free to respond
to the others in a "dominant" or "subservient" manner:

"...each musician must search for missing material in the performance
of the neighbour (pitches from the first, length from the second) and react
to it in different ways: imitate, adapt himself to it (if need be further
develop), do the opposite, become disinterested or something else (something
"unheard of")" (102)

8.5 Patterns of alternation: an agricultural key from
crop rotation

The difficulty in exploring patterns of alternation is the seeming lack of
concrete (as opposed to abstract) examples by which the credibility of such
patterns in practice may become apparent. The rotation of agricultural crops
is therefore an interesting "earthy" practice to explore in the
light of the mind-set which it has required of farmers for several thousand
years.

Crop rotation is the alternation of different crops in the same field in
some (more or less) regular sequence. It differs from the haphazard change
of crops from time to time, in that a deliberately chosen set of crops is
grown in succession in cycles over a period of years. Rotations may be of
any length, being dependent on soil, climate, and crop. They are commonly
of 3 to 7 years duration, usually with 4 crops (some of which may be grown
twice in succession). The different crop rotations on each of the fields
of the set making up the farm as a whole constitute a "crop rotation
system" when integrated optimally.

Long before crop rotation became a science, practice demonstrated that crop
yields decline if the same crop is grown continuously in the same place.
There are therefore many benefits, both direct and indirect, to be obtained
from good rotation (103, pp. 176-8):

Control of pests: with each crop grown the emergence of characteristic
weeds, insects and diseases is facilitated. Changing to another crop inhibits
the spread of such pests which would otherwise become uncontrollable (to the
point that some crops should not be grown twice in succession). By rotating
winter and summer crops, the farmer fights summer weeds in the winter crop
and winter weeds in the summer crop.

Maintenance of organic matter: some crops deplete the organic matter in
the soil, others increase it.

Maintenance of soil nitrogen supply: no single cropping system will ordinarily
maintain the nitrogen supply unless leguminous crops are alternated with others

Economy of labour: several crops may be grown in succession with only
one soil preparation (ploughing). For example: the land is ploughed for
maize, the maize stubble is disked for wheat, then grass and clover are seeded
in the wheat.

Protection of soil: it was once believed necessary to leave land fallow
for part of the cycle. Now it is known that a proper rotation of crops,
with due attention to maintaining the balance of nutrients, is more successful
than leaving the land bare and exposed to leaching and erosion.

Complete use of soil: by alternation between deep- and shallow-rooted
crops the soil may be utilized more completely.

Balanced use of plant nutrients: when appropriately alternated, crops
reduce the different nutrient materials of the soil in more desirable proportions.

Orderly farming: work is more evently distributed throughout the year.
The farm layout is usually simplified and costs of production are reduced.
The rushed work characteristic of haphazard cropping is avoided.

Risk reduction: risks are distributed among several crops as a guarantee
against complete failure.

The situation is somewhat different in the case of single-species forests
where "rotation" is the guiding principle in the special sense of
the economic age to which each crop can be grown before it is succeeded by
the next one. (For example, on a 100-year rotation required for oak, one
per cent of the forest would be clear cut each year, and a further 20 percent
thinned out.) In total contrast to crop rotation the "monoculture"
cropping system in which the same crop is grown every year. This is possible
on a large scale only by the application of chemical fertilizers, herbicide
and pesticides. It leads to long-term problems of soil structure and erosion,
as well as to the accumulation of pollutants.

Because of the short-term advantages of fertilizers, efforts to design new
approaches to crop rotation have been limited. It is only with the resurgence
of interest in non-exploitive, non-polluting agriculture that such possibilities
are being investigated (104).

From an agronomist's perspective, the problem is to strike a balance between
harmonizing the three-fold soil-plant-climate relationship and those of the
economic constraints of production. Because such threefold relationships
are now fairly well understood, rotation cycles can now be considered as a
whole in which the order and the plants used are of secondary importance.
The problem is to ensure that the soil-plant-climate relationship is in an
optimally balanced state at every moment in order to become increasingly independent
of its past. The production constraints complicate this evolution and the
choices possible, especially when requirements change rapidly without taking
into account the recent history of a crop rotation (104)

There is a striking parallel between the rotation of crops and the succession
of (governmental) policies applied in a society. The contrast is also striking
because of the essentially haphazard switch between "right" and
"left" policies. There is little explicit awareness of the need
for any rotation to correct for negative consequence: ("pests")
encouraged by each and to replenish the resources of society ("nutrients",
"soil structure") which each policy so characteristically depletes.

There is no awareness, for example, of the number of distinct policies ("crops")
through which it is useful to rotate. Nor is it known how many such distinct
cycles are necessary for an optimally integrated world society in which the
temporary failure of one, due to adverse circumstances (disaster) is compensated
by the success of others. It is also interesting that during a period of
increasing complaint regarding cultural homogenization ("monoculture"),
voters are either confronted with single-party systems or are frustrated by
the lack of real choice between the alternatives offered. There is something
to be learnt from the mind-sets and social organizations associated with the
stages in the history of crop rotation which evolved, beyond the slash-and-burn
stage, through a 2-year crop-fallow rotation, to more complex 3 and 4-year
rotations. Given the widespread sense of increasing impoverishment of the
quality-of-life, consideration of crop rotation may clarify ways of thinking
about what is being depleted, how to counteract this process, and the nature
of the resources that are so vainly (and expensively) used as "fertilizer"
and "pesticide" to keep the system going in the short-term. The
"yield" to be maximized is presumably human and social development.

8.6 The entropic crisis and the learning response

Society may be usefully perceived as facing an entropic crisis. This view
has been explored by Jeremy Rifkin (105). The second (entropy) law of thermodynamics
states that matter and energy can only be changed in one direction, from usable
to unusable, or from available to unavailable, or from ordered to disordered.
And whenever any semblance of order is created anywhere, it is done at the
expense of causing an even greater disorder in the surrounding environment.
For Rifkin the inexorable nature of this process provides an understanding
of why the existing world views are breaking down. For:

"The laws of thermodynamics, then, govern the physical world. The
way humanity decides to interact with those laws in establishing a framework
for physical existence is of crucial importance in whether humankind's spiritual
journey is allowed to flourish or languish" (105, p. 9) (#16)

He anticipates three types of response to the implications of the entropy
law, namely from optimists, pragmatists, or hedonists. It is very interesting
that he challenges the use to which Prigogine's work on dissipative structures
will be put by the optimists. For Rifkin:

"The theory of dissipative structures is an attempt to provide a growth
paradigm for an energy environment based on renewables, just as Newtonian
physics provided a growth paradigm for a nonrenewable energy environment."
(105, p. 245)

He argues that the theory of dissipative structures completely ignores the
wider significance of the entropy law by concentrating only on that part of
the unfolding process that creates increasing order. And on the question
of irreversibility on a cosmic scale, Prigogine does indeed state "I
prefer to confess ignorance" (39, p. 214). Rifkin continues:

"By refusing to recognize that increased ordering and energy flow-through
always creates ever greater disorder in the surrounding environment, those
who advocate bio-engineering technology as the transforming apparatus for
a renewable energy environment are doomed to repeat the same folly that has
led to the final collapse of our nonrenewable energy environment and the age
of physics that was built upon it." (105, p. 247)

He concludes:

"Like it or not, we are irrevocably headed toward a low-energy society....The
longer we put off the necessary transition from a high- to a low-entropy society,
the bigger the entropy bill becomes and the more difficult the turnaround
becomes....The alternative to this wholescale squandering of available energy
is an internalization of the values and dictates of the entropic paradigm,"
(105, p. 254)

The difficulty is that Rifkin is clear on what should not be done but provides
few practical insights into the social order required to do whatever ought
to be done - whatever that is. In particular, in the light of the theme
of this paper, he accumulates significance in relation to entropy at the expense
of conceptual ordering in relation to issues and perspectives to which others
are sensitive. By striving for support, as does any proponent of a world
view (whatever its merits), he condemns his perspective to compete in the
"gladiatorial arena" discussed earlier.

Rifkin believes that the entropy constraint applies only to the physical
domain and that there is an escape route.

"There are those among us who are willing to accept the finiteness
of the physical world but who believe that the entropic flow is counterbalanced
by an ever-expanding stream of psychic order. To these people, the becoming
process of life is synonymous with the notion of an ever-growing consciousness."
(105, p. 257)

Whatever the merits of the argument, as an ordering device, it does not clarify
the basis for the emergence of such a new psychic order. His presentation
implies that it could be based on a psychic, constraint-free replication of
the pattern which he so effectively criticizes in the physical domain. But
the accumulation of "hot spots" of significance at the expense of
a surrounding, unredeemable "wasteland" of increasing irrelevance
does not seem to be the basis for the needed breakthrough. Whether it is
"experienced" or "achieved", somehow a low-energy psychic
order is required to interrelate the various domains of significance to permit
the emergence of a physical low-energy society. "Hot-wiring", to
use Rifkin's term, also needs to be avoided in the patterns of communication
between such domains, between his "answer" and those of others.

8.7 Alternation between energetic expansion and mentalistic
reduction

The entropic constraint in social development has been specifically explored
by anthropologist Richard Adams. He cites Alfred Lotka's observation that
the second law of thermodynamics cannot be contravened by human action.
Lotka's principle states that in evolution natural selection favours those
populations that convert the greater amount of energy, that is, that bring
the greater amount of energy form and process under control. But any "islands"
of local order are not themselves an indication of counter-entropic process
but rather zones where energy is hastened to entropy or converted into equilibrium
forms (130, pp. 125-6).

Adams argues, with Carneiro, that the evident macroscopic expansion of human
society in terms of "culture traits" is exponential due to this
expansion being proportional to the number of traits already generated.
But instead of culture traits, Adams argues that the concept of energy conversion
(as opposed to input) is more significant, as well as more directly related
to loss of entropy.

He suggests the formulation: "The rate of cultural change is proportional
to the rate of energy conversion carried out within the system." (130,
p. 281). He emphasizes that this is not simply valid for the material
portion of the system. "For not only does the amount of energy in the
system have a direct relation to the amount of energy that will be communicated
and stored, but it is also subjected to the inevitable human-cultural device
of reduction to size." (130, p. 281)

This "reduction to size" takes place through the central process
of binary differentiation which Adams considers as providing the basis for
ranking and the treatment of much of what is meant by value: "I do
not know whether the mere fact of identification, that is, of making a binary
differentiation, may be said to imply the immediate bestowal of something
we may want to call value; and I am not sure that it really makes any difference."
(130, p. 155) A significant aspect of the process is that it is done constantly:

"While there is obviously great individual difference in the relative
ability to project new cuts in the environment, we are nevertheless constantly
imposing old bifurcate categories on new events, thereby reducing them
and simplifying them - in a word, mentally classifying them. More important,
there are regularly new formulations of such differentiations, new ways of
cutting up the world, that are invented and tried out. Most of these, like
the lethal mutants of the genetic process, serve to extinguish themselves
(and in some case their bearers)....Westeners have tended to see this process
of recutting the world as something of a hallmark of progress. It can, however,
also be seen as man's way of reducing the world to size, to terms with which
he can deal." (130, p. 281)

Adams points out that in these terms mankind can be viewed as a species confronting
a constantly changing environment. The confrontations are however repeatedly
made with relatively fixed mental equipment:

"No matter how new the events perceived, they had to be reduced to
a comprehensible scope and to familiar dimensions. The totality of the energetic
component may have been beyond his control, but man could always cut a piece
of it down to size and form it to fit the "order" demanded by his
rnentalistic limitations...So while societies become increasingly complex
in terms of their energetic structures, their organizational dimensions are
constantly reintegrated to mentalistic structural dimensions that are comprehensible
to the human mind." (130, p. 282)

Adams draws attention to research on the apparent limitation on the number
of taxonomic dimensions that the human mind can comfortably handle within
a social communication context (130, pp. 157-8). This number appears to be
around six or seven as discussed earlier (58). He cites studies of folk
taxonomies showing that there are at least five, perhaps six, taxonomic ethnobiological
categories which appear to be highly general if not universal. They are
arranged hierarchically and taxa assigned to each rank are mutually exclusive.
One modern example given is a banner in a hall at the Palais des Nations (Geneva),
indicating: family, village, clan, medieval state, nation, federation (130,
p. 158-9).

For Adams the limited number of levels of integration a society uses to describe
its own organization then replaces in practice the levels of articulation
that may be empirically found in the course of interactions in society (130,
p. 282). Such levels of description then become significant determinants
of the kind of structures which can be perceived as emerging or required in
society (cf. the category structure of the GPID Group A Report). Adams points
out that the process of binary differentiation, taxonomy making and classification,
and ranking with its implicit bestowal of priority, is not an unorganized
activity unrelated to the question of power and control:

"It is, rather, a mentalistic structural concomitant of overt control....Ranking,
then, is an attempt to arrange events in the external world so that they will
behave as our mental limitations dictate and will reflect our ability to handle
them. It becomes a way to put order in the environment, to imbue things
with a positive or negative value that permits them to be maximized, minimized,
or optimized." (130, p. 166)

Adams also notes how the taxonomic limitations are related to the learning
process, even if the six/seven constraint is bypassed as in the Levi-Strauss
observation that the figure of 2,000 is the order of magnitude of the threshold
corresponding roughly to the capacity of memory and power of definition of
ethnozoologies or ethnobotanics reliant on oral tradition. This figure,
taken as 2,047, has been shown by Buchler and Selby (131) to be the number
of items, classes or terminal taxa that would be found in a taxonomy composed
of eleven levels with systematic binary poartioning. Furthermore, the number
of deleted taxa at level seven is then 32, at level eight is 16, at level
nine is 8. These figures correspond closely with the breaking points observed
by Paget and his colleagues in the learning and developing behaviour of children
(1 32, p. 72). In a separate paper (27) it has been argued that such figures
could well be used as a way of rendering comprehensible the design of any
classification system for international organization action. The results
of an exercise of this kind are shortly to be published (133).

Given the above relationship between the mentalistic and energetic components,
much of Adam's study is concerned with how a (demographically) expanding society
organizes itself. For him, the process whereby centralized units expand
through a multiplication of their numbers is a coordinate growth process not
involving any qualitative change. Centralization, however, marks a qualitative
change in the amount of energy that is being brought under control within
one part of the system. The process of development has as a parallel a process
of power centralization, whereas the process of growth has as a parallel a
process of coordination. This correlates closely with the process of ecological
succession except that, instead of moving into a steady state limiting further
expansion, new inventions set aside this governing mechanism and permit an
increase of energy input to press for a continued expansion (130, p. 287).
Of great interest therefore is the possibility of using computers to assist
in the invention of better cuts of the environment which remain comprehensible.
This is one reason for further investigating tensegrity organization as a
more powerful way of handling and integrating sets of binary differentiations.

Adams draws attention to the oscillation between the two modes noted
above (which correspond to mentalistic and energetic emphases):

"The alternation of phases of coordination and centralization that
can be seen in the macro view of societal and cultural evolution is equally
useful in the examination of the processes that particular societies are undergoing
at a given point in time....This oscillation may take place simultaneously
in two phases or dimensions: (a) horizontal, that is, the shift
from a fragmented (identity) unit to a coordinated unit and back (in other
terms, fusion and fission, or recombination and segmentation); and (b) vertical,
that is, the shift from a coordinated unit to a centralized unit and back
(also described as integration and disintegration, centralization and decentralization,
etc.)" (130, pp. 290-3)

The literature of ethnography and history is replete with instances of societies
undergoing some such kind of oscillation, of which Adams gives a number of
examples. With regard to this alternation process he concludes:

"I think that we would have to argue that oscillations are inevitable
parts of the evolutionary process; they are the ongoing trial-and-error
of a unit, at whatever level, the coming into direct touch with the environment,
the testing of the validity of mentalistic pictures and accumulated knowledge.
It is the constant inherent structural push toward expansion that makes actors
and the units they operate in try again. The oscillating pattern simply
means some lack of success, which may be due to any of a wide variety of circumstances.
But "success" is hardly the appropriate word, particularly when
we recognize that consumption and destruction are both necessary parts of
the scene. The fact that old people die will, in the long run, mean success
for the young. Or what is successful centralization for one nation, state,
chiefdom, may spell disaster for another. What is important about the oscillation
process is that it cues the observer as to what he should be looking for.
Every operating unit will be at some stage of oscillation at any point
in time; to seek out its state and the factors that make it move is to understand
how the power system is currently working." (130, p. 298, emphasis added)

8.8 Uncertainty: the source of meaning

In a study still in progress, John and David Keppel explore the situation
of man at the interface between the entropic degradation of order and the
development of new forms of order(134). For them new conceptual tools are
required to respond to those aspects of the current social condition for which
determinism has proved inadequate, if not dangerous in its efforts to maximize
certainty and to marginalize uncertainty. They see the key as lying in the
logic of living systems with their inherent ability to deal with uncertainty
to their own developmental advantage. There are principles involved in this
logic which are valuable to any new ordering of society.

In such a framework the spread of control among diverse entities serves
as a focus
for the development of any such system.
Error, imperfection and accident, with
their implicit static bias, are in fact vital to learning within any living
process, in
contrast to their current status in societal management. Destruction of information
in any form may well lead to the recovery of uncommitted potentiality for
adaptive
response to change. For the Keppels
what persists are the broad principles according
to which things in flux relate to each other.

The preliminary study stresses the importance of the partnership of
living beings as
essential to regulatory feedback processes based on differences. Such symbiosis
depends on the essential diversity or non-homogeneity of society. Reciprocal
relations underlie all evolutionary processes and are essential to mental
development, psychic balance and cultural advance.

Whilst the arguments are developed in some detail with specific
suggestions for
political initiatives in the United States, at both national and at local
levels, the
study does not - in its preliminary form -
demonstrate the nature of the new
conceptual and social patterns required.
It is one thing to draw attention to the
principles involved and to show how they work in nature. It is another to elaborate
their implications at the level at which they enable new initiatives to be
undertaken. They stress that evolution
works by the adaptation of existing
structures rather than by exact design of a new structure suited to the new
order.
But the question is what form to give to the "conceptual ley lines"
to enable such
adaptation to take place in a decentralized manner. Is it sufficient to assume that
the logic of living uncertainty is an adequate guideline? If not, how is this
understanding to be "geared down" to facilitate the emergence of more
appropriate
patterns? How is it to avoid being
coopted as a newly fashionable cosmetic for
unchanging strategies, as have so many previous guidelines over the past decades -
cooperation, development, interdisciplinarity, networking, etc.?

This difficulty calls for a means of building into the conceptual
framework
countervailing elements of a kind which correspond to the diversity-enhancing
nature
of the principles involved.
Specifically the study does not take into account the
dynamics resulting from opposition to those principles and the process of
attempting
to implement them. How are they to
respond to their own negation? How are
they
to "dance" with those of the opposition? It is giving form to the nature of the dance
which is the core of the problem of "coherence" which the authors
identify as the
only authoritative answer to the present chaos of problems and rival
solutions. But
in the authors' own terms, coherence must surely dance with incoherence in a
developing society grounded on uncertainty.

Uncertainty is clearly closely related to "future
possibility". Both are associated
with "ignorance", a feature of the learning process discussed
earlier. Society may
have various attitudes towards all three.
At the moment defensiveness prevails.
Ignorance in particular is a social "evil". It must be "eliminated", despite the fact
that it is "regenerated" with every baby born "ignorant",
and with every scientific
and cultural innovation about which people are as yet ignorant. It is also generated
in government, military and commercial practices, even at the grass-roots
level,
through the need to avoid revealing the truth under certain conditions (143, 144).

Specialists are necessarily educated to be ignorant of domains other than
that with which they are specifically concerned. Ignorance is in fact the
matrix from which innovation and renewal emerge. As with the generation
of event-horizons by black holes, it is the orifice through which we enter
time, or leave it. The problem is not to eliminate it, but rather to accept
it (as every parent does, usually with pleasure) to recognize its positive
functions, and to give it a central "place" in society rather than
marginalizing it. Unless it is appropriately "contained", society
is unable to relate effectively to the direction from which its own future
development will emerge. Rejection of ignorance is a rejection of transformative
development. All that then remains is non-transformative development in
the light of pre-existing, "ignorance-free" programmes.

8.9 Morphic resonance

An understanding of development calls for an understanding of how the shapes
and behavioural patterns of psycho-social entities are determined. Rupert
Sheldrake, a biochemist, has recently explored the limitations of the prevailing
paradigm in biology and has put forward an original and revolutionary answer
to this problem. His closely argued thesis is that the form, development and
behaviour of living organisms, including human beings, are shaped by "morphogenetic"
fields of a type at present not recognized by physics. His presentation
suggests a fruitful new approach to thinking about the emergence, stabilization
and development of societal, institutional and conceptual patterns and structures.

Sheldrake argues that such morphogenetic fields are moulded by the form and
behaviour of past organisms of the same species through direct connections
across both space and time:

"The characteristic form of a given morphic unit is determined by
the forms of previous similar systems which act upon it across time and space
by a process called morphic resonance. This influence takes place
through the morphogenetic field and depends on the system's three-dimensional
structures and patterns of vibration. Morphic resonance is analogous to
energetic resonance in its specificity, but is not explicable in terms of
any known type of resonance, nor does it involved a transmission of energy."
(128, p.116-7).

The relevance to human and social development lies in the way in which this
insight clarifies the influence or constraining effect of past patterns on
the possible emergence of new patterns. What he is suggesting is that "by
morphic resonance the form of a system, including its characteristic internal
structure and vibrational frequencies, becomes present to a subsequent system
with a similar form; the spatio-temporal pattern of the forms superimposes
itself on the latter." (128, p.96) Forms therefore get "canalized"
or locked into particular developmental pathways known as "chreodes"
(129). The difficulty of shifting into more fruitful developmental pathways
is thus explained by the "weight" of all past systems of similar
form. These act to increase the probability of the repetition of forms of
a given type:

"The most frequent type of previous form makes the greatest contribution
by morphic resonance, the least frequent the least: morphogenetic fields
are not precisely defined but are represented by probability structures which
depend on the statistical distribution of previous similar forms." (128,
p.l18)

The emergence of new forms, or a "new order", of any kind is therefore
a low probability event difficult to bring about. But once the pattern has
been brought about it becomes progressively easier to maintain. "Once
the final form of a morphic unit is actualized, the continued action of morphic
resonance from similar past forms stabilizes and maintains it." (128,
p. 118) Sheldrake puts forward evidence in support of this hypothesis and
suggests a number of experiments by which it may be verified.

His perspective can also be applied to the problem of learning about the
nature of any new order whilst "immersed" in the patterns of the
old order:

"People usually repeat characteristically structured activities which
have already been performed over and over again by many generations of their
predecessors....All the patterns of activity characteristic of a given culture
can be regarded as chreodes....rnorphic resonance cannot itself lead an individual
into one set of chreodes rather than another. So none of these patterns
of behaviour expresses itself spontaneously: all have to be learned....Then
as the process of learning begins, usually by imitation, the performance of
a characteristic pattern of movement brings the individual into morphic resonance
with all those who have carried out this pattern of movement in the past.
Consequently learning is facilitated as the individual 'tunes in' to specific
chreodes." (128, p.195-6)

This suggests the fink between learning, chreodes and the "answer domains"
which were the point of departure of this paper. Sheldrake in effect clarifies
the specificity of patterns of credibility and the relationship between them.
In the psycho-conceptual realm, his morphogenetic fields are as much "credibility
structures" as probability structures. It is easier, for example, to
get funds for research that has been done in the past because its credibility
has already been established. Such fields render patterns perceivable or
recognizable.

Sheldrake provides a framework within which to take the alternation argument
of this paper a step further. In the turbulence of modern society it is
to be expected that at a particular moment strategy/pattern A would prove
appropriate to a community (say). But the environmental turbulence may well
erode its appropriateness and effectively call for the emergence of strategy/pattern
B, or C, or D. There will probably be morphic predecessors for each, possibly
embedded in the folk tales of the culture, to give some credibility to the
"alternatives". But the alternatives are in each case relatively
high probability/credibility structures compared to the meta-strategy/pattern
(A:B:C:D), which allows the community to shift between these alternatives
in response to the turbulence of the environment. There are few morphic predecessors
to clarify this pattern. Hence the importance of seeking out the kinds of
analogies recorded in this paper.

The question then becomes how to increase the credibility of this meta-strategy/pattern
rather than, as at present, how to increase the credibility of some momentarily
significant alternative. Visions of desirable futures could therefore
usefully focus on alternation patterns as much as on the specific patterns
or alternatives between which alternation must necessarily take place in a
dynamic society (#15).

Diagram 8: Diagrammatic representation of the development of a system
from a morphogenetic germ (triangle) by the normal chreode, A. An alternative
morphogenetic pathway is represented by B, regulation byC, and regeneration
by D. The virtual form within the morphogenetic field is indicated by the
stippled area. Reproduced with slight modificationfrom Sheldrake
(128, p. 78)

For it is the meta-pattern of alternation which provides the transition pathways
between its essentially antagonistic constituent patterns. Without such
pathways the transition itself becomes socially catastrophic, irrespective
of the catastrophies the appropriate alternative is designed to avert. Unfortunately
our present mind-set requires that transitions should be socially catastrophic
because, like a stumbling infant or a drunken adult, we have not yet collectively
learned any better way of shifting from leg to leg in the process of moving
forward.

An adapted version of one of Sheldrake's diagrams is included to suggest
the nature of the dynamics between the "completed" meta-pattern
and various partial patterns in which only some strategies are explicit (see
Diagram 6). The complementarity of such constituent partial patterns may
well be governed by its own type of rnorphic resonance - between different
"lock and key" forms, rather than between similar forms as
in Sheldrake's case. Each morphic "lock" then provides a morphic
niche for a "key" whose emergence it eventually evokes, although
in more complex cases the number of distinct morphic species interlocking
in this way might be much greater than two.

8.10 Toward an enantiomorphic polity

William Irwin Thompson, a cultural historian, has sharpened considerably
the ecology-sensitive intuition concerning the psycho-social lessons to be
learned from cooperation between co-evolving systems (106). He stresses
the importance of an appropriate understanding of the interaction between
opposites by citing E.F. Schumacher:

"The pairs of opposites, of which freedom and order and growth
and decay are the most basic, put tension into the world, a tension that
sharpens man's sensitivity and increases his self-awareness. No real understanding
is possible without awareness of these pairs of opposites which permeate everything
man does....Justice is a denial of mercy, and mercy is a denial of justice.
Only a higher force can reconcile these opposites: wisdom. The problem
cannot be solved but wisdom can transcend it. Similarly, societies need stability
and change, tradition and innovation, public interest and
private interest, planning and laissez-faire, order and freedom,
growth and decay. Everywhere society's health depends on the simultaneous
pursuit of mutually opposed activities or aims. The adoption of a final
solution means a kind of death sentence for man's humanity and spells either
cruelty or dissolution, generally both." (107, p. 127).

For Thompson any ecosystem is a form of life in which opposites interact:

"It isn't the case that the ocean is right and the continent wrong...As
it is with an ecosystem, so it is with a political system. It isn't the
case that one party is right and the other party is wrong. Truth cannot
be expressed in an ideology, for Truth is that which over-lights the conflict
of opposed ideologies." (106, p. 32)

As with Attali, Thompson refers to Atlan's synthesis of information theory
and biology. Atlan moves beyond the prevalent superficial enthusiasm for
cooperation by recognizing the role of discontinuity in healthy development:

"So then, it would suffice to consider organization as an uninterrupted
process of disorganization-reorganization, and not as a state, so that order
and disorder, the organized and the contingent, construction and destruction,
life and death are no longer so distinct. And moreover that is not all.
These processes where the unity of opposites manifests (such a unity is not
realised as a new state, a synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis, it
is the movement of the process itself which constitutes the "synthesis"),
these processes cannot exist unless the errors are a priori true errors, that
order at any given moment is truly disturbed by disorder, that destruction
(though not total) is still real, that the irruption of the event is a veritable
irruption (a catastrophe or a miracle or both). In other words, these processes
which appear to us as one of the fundamental organizing features of living
beings, the result of a sort of collaboration between what one customarily
calls life and death, can only exist precisely when it is not a question
of co-operation but always radical opposition and negation." (1 7,
p. 57) (emphasis added)

In this context Thompson argues that:

"A global polity cannot be simply capitalist or communist, Christian
or Muslim; it has to be a planetary ecology of each and all....As ecology
begins to inform our perceptions of the body politic, we will begin to understand
that any polity must be an interaction of opposites. In a policy that has
the shape of opposites, the wisdom of William Blake's "In opposition
is true friendship" will be understood." (106, p. 32)

Thompson does not elaborate on his understanding of the dynamic nature of
the relations between opposites in the polity, except through the overused
term "interaction" and the notion of "symbiosis". Despite
his quotation of Atlan, he interprets such interaction as cooperation, without
giving much more than the usual "public relations" content to the
term. And yet it is the nature or pattern of healthy interaction which is
the goal of the collective quest at this time.

By introducing the powerful concept of enantiornorphy he stresses
the static aspect of the mirror image nature of the relationship between
opposites, at an archetypal level. Elsewhere he introduced the "inexorable"
process of enantiodromia (#16), whereby opposites eventually transform
into each other. For example: "The rejection of industrialization in
romanticism ended up by becoming the mechanization of romanticism in that
blend of nativism and technology, Nazism" (106, p. 20)

This process is strongly related to that of alternation as explored here.
And Thompson does affirm (106, p. 175) both the cyclic and innovative
learning nature of this process by quoting the well-known verse of T.S. Eliot:
"The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and
know the place for the first time." Thompson develops his argument by
exploring in some detail "one model for a field of interacting opposites".
He uses the traditional psycho-cultural image of the Quaternity, a geometrical
version of William Blake's "Fourfold Vision" (#17). This permits
an enantiomorphic juxtaposition of the four basic political orientations he
distinguishes: conservative, liberal, radical, reactionary. The four political
parties "attempt to play out certain values in time...". He suggests
that the structure can also be used to interrelate the four basic political
and economic worlds he distinguishes: the capitalistic first world, the communist
second world, the resource rich third world, and the fourth world of least
developed countries:

"In the present transitional world-system, the interactions of the
Four Worlds are unconscious, full of projections, and laden with conflict
and violence....The purpose of invoking the archaic Quaternity in a modern
context of international relations is to make the unconscious conscious...The
Quaternity enables us to see and model relationships of a more complex, polycentric
variety." (106, p. 50)

Thompson suggests that the fashionable centre-periphery model increases the
potential for conflict by reinforcing simplistic perceptions of possible relationships.
But he believes that in such a "planetary ecology...the health of the
whole requires that one does not dominate the others." (106, p. 50)
This is an over-simplified (or possibly atemporal) understanding of "dominance"
in ecological systems. It does not reflect Atlan's view, nor does it accord
with the process of alternation as argued here. Alternation, through enantiodromia,
may indeed be understood to follow patterns such as Thompson's quarternity,
but in them it is the dominance, or focus of power, which switches its locus
in order to maintain the health of the whole. Dominance can only be absent
in a system of maximum entropy associated with "energy death".
Or it may appear to be absent, when in effect it has been displaced
into a less obvious form whose consequences may be much more pernicious, as
in the case of structural violence.

Both Thompson and Klapp (41) use the metaphor of a ball-game (with four zones
or teams), whilst stressing that "the rules and the court are not the
game; they are merely conditions that enable the game to be played" (106,
p. 44). But initiative (#18)and dominance lie where the ball is located,
even though it must be expressed by movement of the ball for the game to continue,
with the real risk of its loss to another team whenever their strategy is
more appropriate. But there is a vast difference between a good game and
a bad one (whatever the quantitative indicators), and none of the above clarifies
the art of playing a qualitatively superior game (#19). It does suggest
that such a game is possible.

8.11 Game comprehension and identity transformation

In the previous section Thompson draws attention to the need to understand
the patterns encoded by more complex games. Jantsch cites Eigen who is investigating
the new lessons to be learnt in biology concerning the "game of life".
And indeed Eigen has recently co-authored a book on the "Laws of the
Game" (135). It is to be expected that such games can encode richer
and more dynamic patterns, which is one reason for the resources allocated
to war games and the hopes of finding "win-win" solutions attached
to world modelling exercises based on game theory.

Xavier Sallantin, a military theorist working on the logic of conflictual
systems, has provided a valuable analysis of the nature of the domains to
which game theory applies, thus clarifying hidden dimensions underlying reliance
on the game perspective (1 36). Interestingly, in the light of the "answer
arena" theme of this paper, Sallantin uses a "gladiatorial arena"
to illustrate his point. He notes that in that arena the gladiators risk
their lives, the rule of the game being that one of them should die, however
carefully they study their moves.

Surrounding that arena are the "stands" from which spectators
observe, as well as
betting their assets on the issue of the game. There are therefore two categories
of "players" at such a "circus", one risking existence, the
other risking possession.
In "vital" games of the first degree, the gladiator risks himself,
whilst in "venal"
games of the second degree the spectator risks an object he possesses. The
distinction between these domains is further clarified by the processes which
occur
when a spectator daringly jumps into the arena to taunt the gladiators -
only to
escape back again when the risk becomes too great, as is the case in many
"demonstrations". Or when a
gladiator jumps into the stands to expose bettors to
the reality in which they only wish to participate vicariously, as occurs in
cases of
terrorism.

Sallantin demonstrates that in terms of logic, the negation resulting
from the loss
of the "bet" does not have the same status when applied to games of
the first
degree, involving a co-terminous subject and object (constituting a unity in
arithmetic terms) as in the second, where they are distinct (constituting a
duality).
In physical terms the first terminates temporal
existence, whereas the second
terminates a spatial relationship (between the bettor and his property) having
the
character of a cohesive force. He shows that such distinctions are an
essential
condition for univocal communication, whether in biology or in informatics.

For Sallantin the ontological status of the game has an entirely
different meaning if
one's existence or identity is liable to be terminated by it. He points out that
recognition of this meaning is what distinguishes "militants",
whether conscripted
or self-appointed, from those who only risk the loss of a possession and may
well
re-enter a later phase of the game to gain it back twofold. It is one thing to risk
loss of academic status in favouring Gandhian non-violence, for example, it is
another to risk one's life in the active practice of it.

In games of the first degree a positive relationship to death must be
developed
which effectively redefines the game.
The encounter with death involves a
transformative process of great psychological significance for those who
undergo
it. This is absent in games of the
second degree, except in a vicarious sense.
Setting aside the problem of counteracting abuses of militancy in any form,
Sallantin questions whether a society can satisfactorily order itself without
the
kinds of commitment and identity-risk implied by games of the first
degree. This is
the assumption made by those who seek substitutes for such games in games of
the
second degree. The positive function
of games of the first degre is clarified in
cultures recognizing the "way of the warrior" -
the theme of a proposed
international conference which would not simply deny the value of the military
perspective (151).

To further clarify the hidden dimensions and degrees of freedom behind
the rules of
a game, Sallantin draws attention to the possibility that the gladiators might
subvert the game, and the expectations of spectators, by seeking death together
rather than fighting to live. He
illustrates this possibility by locating a "pit of
annihilation" in the centre of the arena into which one or both might
jump. This
then represents a game of degree zero.
Although he does not discuss the
possibility, presumably this also covers the case when the gladiators blow up
both
themselves and the observers in the stands.

Sallantin further develops his argument by mapping the arenas into a spheric
geometric model which recalls Fuller's preoccupations. He suggests that
the limited freedom in the confrontation between the gladiators (resembling
that of a tournament "list") can best be represented by a diameter
of a circle, where the area of the latter represents the domain of the bettors.
The centre of the circle then represents the pit of annihilation (into which
a gladiator may jump or be pushed). He then defines a third domain, having
a further dimension of freedom, represented by the sphere of which such a
circle is a cross-section. The sphere is then the "space" within
which bettors and gladiators mentally model and evaluate the progress of the
game in endeavouring to assess how best to make their next moves. It is also
the conceptual domain in which our own thinking links with theirs in
endeavouring to grasp the rules of the game. It is a transdimensional domain
in that it permits moves across dimensional frontiers but it also negates
the spaces of more limited degrees of freedom in which games of lower degrees
become possible. This negating process is counteracted whenever a "position"
is taken by the generation of a line representing a possible first degree
game. The spheric "trans-spatial" domain is thus one of free interplay
of possibilities from which particular games crystallize.

Sallantin then points out the need to correlate the conceptual freedom of
the trans-spatial domain with the verbal domain within which consensus
is established. For a game to be possible, all involved must be "attuned"
in a consensus on the rules, on a reference polarization, or on a direction
of the game.

This is most evident in fixing a convention for the interpretatation of the
codification of a "bit" in informatics, as being signaled either
by "switch on" or "switch off". A similar convention
is necessary to specify which pole of a battery is to be considered "positive"
or "negative". Sallantin's striking example of the fundamental
nature of this question is that of a referee who asks two players before
the game whether they understand the rules. Both nod their heads. However
one comes from a culture in which, unknown to the referee, a nod indicates
a negative, not an affirmative. For players to be in agreement, they
must first be in agreement about the significance of the verb "to agree".

Sallantin argues that any such consensus is intimately related to the physical
phenomenon of resonance. There is an ontological correlation between
verbal agreement and the physical resonance expressing that agreement or in
the syntony between sender and received: "Il faut necessairement que
le signifie et le signifiant de la concordance concordent, sinon la concordance
signifierait la discordance."

Each of the four "universals" so defined for any game are then
interpreted by Sallantin in terms of four distinct ways of being:

being in time or existing;

being bound by a force to some totality sharing a common characteristic;

not being, or being absent, for lack of an appropriate space within
which to act; and

being "that" of which the meaning is the subject of a consensus.

The first three are aspects of the fourth. Sallantin suggests that the fourth
may be represented by a hyperspace, as an affirmatory polar complement to
the negatory function represented by the centre of the sphere. The development
of the system through increase in its negentropy is then a function of the
settings or levels on which the consensus is based to determine the nature
of possible games. Sallantin suggests that when the processes of society
as a whole are seen as a game, the four different domains (vital, venal, conceptual
and verbal) may then be associated with different aspects of society (military,
economic, political and social, respectively). His use of "military"
needs however to be seen as signifying any creative confrontation with the
risk of the loss of identity.

His insights cast a fruitful light on the arguments of previous sections.
Once again the need for a fourfold grasp of a system through distinct "languages"
is demonstrated. Use of a spheric model ties in with earlier arguments concerning
a non-linear container, as does his insistence on the importance of resonance
in interrelating the participants. Note however that consensus understood
as based on resonance is quite different in nature from a static, superficial
consensus where there is no understanding of the resonance dynamics which
make it possible.

It is this constraining force which is a vital aspect of the human and social
development process.

Prior to the end-game, the dynamics of the game may be seen for each participant
as an exciting alternation between conditions of "advantage" and
"disadvantage". With the termination of the game and the alternation
process, the identity of one participant is "exalted" and that of
the other is "extinguished", crushed or dissipated. There is a distinct
transformation of state, achievement of which is usually the object
of the game, whether sought or feared as a resolution of uncertainty. This
change of state constitutes a form of development. According to conventional
thinking, winning is obviously better, since it ensures immediate "development"
(for the winner), whereas losing is to be avoided at all cost (as an unwelcome
increase in personal "entropy"). Winning is perhaps the most widely
accepted social indicator of development. Development theorists seek "win-win"
solutions to avoid the unfortunate loss of identity, or the continuous generation
of "losers" in a two-class society: we should all be "winners".

The preoccupation with winning is also confused with the cult of the new,
the cult of youth, the cult of the beautiful, the cult of "bigness",
and the cult of "wealth". These reinforce each other so that achievement
of any is to some degree an achievement of the others. Unchecked, such cults
respectively favour: the exploitation of non-renewable resources and the
erosion of collective learning, the rejection and institutionalization of
the elderly, the avoidance of unbeautiful realities (including toxic waste
dumps, slums and the deformed), the inhibition of grass-roots initiatives,
and the marginalization of the poor. It is precisely this obsession
with winning and the avoidance of loss which obscures a more fundamental alternation
process on which long-term human and social development may well be grounded.

The problem with win maximizing is that success tends to be due to the
deployment of
a particular set of attributes which confer advantage under particular
environmental
conditions. The winner is however
trapped by these attributes when the environment
changes and other sets of attributes have an advantage. New "winners" then tend to
emerge from the pool of "losers".
It is in fact in this pool that are conserved those
"psycho-social genes" governing attributes not currently manifest. But whilst the
winners have relatively little freedom within their defining attributes, new
forms can
emerge from the pool of losers into which all winners must eventually be
reabsorbed.
In terms of long-term human and social development there is therefore in
operation
an ecocyclic process. Focus on a
single game merely offers insights into a portion of
that cycle - a broken cycle. It does not show what happens to the winner
after
reaching the state of identity exaltation, nor to the loser after having been exposed to
identity extinction.

A new dimension may be added to Sallantin's analysis by introducing the
concept of
"degree of identification" for this is basically what distinguishes
gladiators from
bettors. (It would be fruitful to
explore Atkin's (72) description of communication
geometry as a framework for identity of different degrees.) The identity of the
gladiator tends to be engaged in the game, through his physical
"self-bet", to a far
greater degree than that of the bettor.
But clearly if the bettor's self-image is
identified to a very high degree with his possessions, which he then loses,
then he too
may well be psychologically destroyed by the outcome of the game. What is
interesting about this kind of identity "death", which R.D. Laing has
shown to be a
powerful existential experience, IN that it opens up the possibility of a
"rebirth", if
the player can then reformulate his identity on a new foundation. The winner, once
exalted does not however have access
to this possibility of rebirth, which necessarily
requires a destruction of the set of characteristics by which his identity as a
winner is
defined. Even if the winner wins in a
new game he merely confirms and extends the
exaltation of his identity, but he does not renew it. It is the difference between a
quantitative and a qualitative development.
The latter calls for a fundamental
transformation based on a radical "mise en question" following real
loss.

The loss phase can be related to the learning process. As Kenneth Boulding points
out: "Disappointment forces a learning process of some kind upon
us; success does
not." (152, pp. 1 33). There is
then a need to change the image of the world in some
way (152, p. 145). He suggests that
science itself "is essentially a system of
organized learning from disappointments"
(152, p. 135). Beyond the play
on words,
there is even value in the link between "appointment" (as a
win-phase) and
"disappointment" as the loss-phase which must necessarily follow it.

By designing strategies to minimize disappointment, there is clearly the
risk of
minimizing learning. Again, Boulding
notes: "One of the most striking
phenomena of
the human learning process is the extent to which it is self-limiting. Far beyond the
physiological capacity of the human nervous system, we learn not to learn. We
paint
ourselves into a tiny corner of the bast ballroom of the human nervous
system." (152,
p. 1 56-7). This then implies that we learn not to engage in transformative
development.

This suggests that long-term
human and social development is based on a process
involving risk of identity loss, winning and losing. Periods of losing are then as
important as periods of winning to the development process. Just as "small is
beautiful" so "decay is also ok" - a fairly obvious remark with
regard to ecological
processes. Real strength, in military
terms, comes with the ability to accept loss and
the lessons it brings, including the ability to be weak and disorganized. Real weakness
results from an identification with the need to win always and be permanently
strong
- in judo terms, the inability to take a fall and learn to lose as part of a
larger
process. Development through
alternation between the conditions of winning and
losing is then associated with the ability to "disintegrate" at will
and to "reintegrate"
at will - without long-term
identification with the forms used in this process.

This recalls the arguments of de Nicolas, discussed earlier, concerning
the
fundamental importance of sacrifice as part of the renewal of form in the Rg
Veda.
Educating a child, for example, involves an understanding of when the child
should
lose and when the child should be allowed to win - accepting the fact that at some
stage it will no longer be a question of "allowing" him to win. The teacher must
eventually accept the opportunity of identity loss as a real loser if the
student is ever
genuinely to experience the nature of the win portion of the cycle and learn
how to
use it responsibly. The teacher, like
the parent and the psychoanalyst, must accept
rejection if the student is to be free.

The win mind-set is partly responsible for the inadequacy of the
response to economic
cycles. Troughs are necessarily
experienced as regrettable, and efforts are
necessarily made to maintain peaks -
but it would probably be extremely unhealthy
to eliminate the cycle, even if that were possible. The problem is that the transitions
and associated transformations are spastically forced upon the relevant actors
for
lack of any sense of the developmental significance of any cycle involving
loss. To
employ a biological metaphor, deciduous trees are a more advanced evolutionary
form
than evergreens precisely because of their ability to engage in a cycle of leaf
loss and
subsequent regeneration. The
combustion engine is possible because it integrates a
cycle of ignition/combustion with extinction/evacuation, in which the latter
makes
possible the power strike of the former portion.

Loss phobia and win mania, which are themselves integral and necessary
features of a
larger alternation cycle, obscure the nature of that cycle and its significance
for
human and social development. It is
unfortunate that lack of awareness of such
cycles may well contribute to the ambiguous status of widely used techniques
common
to political "re-education", business executive
"re-motivation" (in Japan), religious
"conversion", and military manpower "training". In these highly successful processes,
whose phases are now well-defined, "stripping" of identity is one of
the techniques
applied as a preliminary to forcing the person to "win-through" to a
new understanding
and self-image (142). Greater
understanding of such cycles is required to determine
to what extent the "manipulative" nature of such techniques of
"human development"
is acceptable, under what conditions, and to whom - and whether more acceptable
processes can be envisaged.

8.12 Ecodynamics and societal evolution

Under the concept ecodynamics, Kenneth Boulding, an economist, has attempted
an ambitious synthesis which interrelates many physical, biological and social
processes that are usually kept apart (152). Of special interest in the light
of the argument of this paper is that his synthesis internalizes both its
conflictural relationship to other competing visions and the recognition of
its own mortality as an artifact.

"Every vision, of course, conflicts with other visions...Each vision
must be understood in terms of what it is not as well as in terms of
what it is" (152, p. 19)

He therefore indicates how his evolutionary vision is "unfriendly"
to various other visions to which his is an alternative. A special feature
of his vision is the recognition of the dynamics of the relationship between
such visions as they emerge as artifacts and occupy and expand various riches
in society.

For Boulding "The pattern of human development is therefore seen to
be an extension, enlargement, and acceleration of the pattern of biological
development, operating through mutation and selection." (152, p. 18).
Social dynamics is then to be thought of primarily as the evolution of human
artifacts. Human artifacts not only include material structures and objects,
they also include organizations, institutions and social groupings. These
all originate and are sustained by images in the human mind. Such artifacts
are species just as much as biological artifacts. And:

"Just as there is the genosphere or genetic know-how in the biosphere,
so there is a noosphere of human knowledge and know-how in the sociosphere.
The noosphere is the totality of the cognitive content, including values,
of all human nervous systems, plus the prosthetic devices by which this system
is extended and integrated in the form of libraries, computers, telephones..."
(152, p. 122)

The processes of biological evolution are also to be found in the evolution
of human artifacts, namely replication, recombination, reconstitution, redefinition
(mutation) and selection. Boulding suggests that Darwin's metaphor concerning
the "survival of the fittest" is unfortunate. "A more accurate
metaphor would be the survival of the fitting, the fitting being what fits
into a niche in an ecosystem" (152, p. 110). This corresponds to the
self-consistency constraint imposed on the organization of dissipative structures.
Furthermore:

The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological
evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution -
that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have
described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the
phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases
in knowledge operating through energy and materials to
produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration
and exchange - all interact on each other." (152, p. 224)

Boulding sharpens the generality of this statement by noting that it is changes
in knowledge or know-how that are the basic source of all other changes.
In biological evolution it is the genetic structure that evolves with the
phenotypes as encoded carriers of it. In societal evolution it is the human
artifacts which are encoders of the knowledge structure that is nevertheless
continually expressed in human beings. Knowledge is therefore primal as
"what evolves" (152, pp. 224-5). The "noogenetic" processes
by which each generation of human beings learns from the last then come to
be of far greater importance than the biogenetic processes by which genes
are transmitted. But, as noted earlier, Boulding sees as the ultimate constraint
that "we learn not to learn" and that "the learning patterns
themselves are self-limiting." (152, p. 123)

The question is then what self-limiting patterns emerge and how are they
to be comprehended? For it is then these patterns which govern the kinds
of human and social development that are currently possible - unless richer
patterns can be designed or comprehended.

Boulding has many reservations about dialectics as one of the basic patterns,
aside from the problems of the confused variety of meanings associated with
it. "The substantive question, which is very difficult to answer, is
just what is the quantitative or even qualitative significance of dialectical
processes, interpreted narrowly as involving conscious conflict, struggle,
victory and defeat, winning or losing, revolution and counterrevolution, war
and peace, in the great four-dimensional tapestry of the universe."
(152, p. 262) He asks when it matters who wins and suggests that such processes
affect the details rather than the larger patterns of history, arguing that
this could however be significant on historical "watersheds" (152,
p. 262-5).

Boulding recognizes that few people accept this view:

"Dialectics in many different forms has a surprisingly good press.
Most people believe that struggle is very important and that it is important
to be on the right side in a conflict....Part of the difficulty is that the
human race has an enormous and by no means unreasonable passion for the dramatic,
and conflict is much more dramatic than production....The awful truth about
the universe - that it is not only rather a muddle, but also pretty dull
- is wholly unacceptable to the human imagination. Nevertheless, it is the
dull, nondialectical processes that hold the world together, that move it
forward, and that provide the setting within which the dialectical processes
take place. Evolution is the theatre, dialectics the play. It is a tragic
error to mistake the play for the yheatre, however, because that all too easily
ends in the theatre burning down...Unless there is a reasonably widespread
appreciation of the proper role of dialectical processes, these tend to get
out of hand and become extremely destructive....doing more harm than good."
(152, p. 266)

The popularity of dialectics, regretfully noted by Boulding, is however due
to the ("seductive") sense of transformation with which it is associated.
This is necessarily absent from the "dull" production processes
which "hold the world together", protecting it from the effects
of random disturbances. The two can however best be perceived as complementary.
But the problem is indeed one of how to provide the setting within which the
dialectical processes can take place. Is this not the problem of comprehending
equilibrium processes as a context for disequilibrium processes, or at least
of designing the (shifting) balance between them? Here however Boulding
does not offer many insights because he is seemingly handicapped by his stress
on "everything depends on everything else". How indeed is the
manifold to be structured for comprehension, or by it?

Boulding offers a useful point of departure in a discussion of types of ecological
interaction between two species. These are (152, p. 78):

Mutual cooperation

Parasitism

Predation

Mutual competition

Dominant - cooperative

Dominent - competitive

Mutual independence

Now in a biological environment the species may well be locked into one of
these types of interaction. In the case of the social environment interacting
species, including organizations and roles, may well switch from one type
of interaction to another. This is perhaps seen most clearly in the case
of two individuals (e.g. husband and wife) or of two nation-states. In both
cases there can be an alternation between many of the types according to circumstances.
Within any type the interaction may well have dramatic potential as a disequilibrium
process for the individuals involved. For the population of those interacting
species, however, such interactions may form part of a non-transformative
equilibrium cycle (e.g. predation cycles). Switching between types
of interaction may also constitute a dramatic change of strategy as a disequilibrium
process for the individuals involved. But the pattern of alternation between
strategies would then provide an equilibrium context for such shifts.

Conventional values stress the importance of everyone abandoning other types
of interaction in favour of the "mutual cooperation" type. Boulding
suggests, using the classic example of the "prisoner's dilemma",
that "there is a very long-run evolutionary process in this direction
that is precarious, however, in the sense that it is constantly being interrupted
by lapses" (152, p. 204). He points out that there are "limits
to love" about which little is known (152, p. 203 and 304). Of course
these "lapses" are the very ingredients of much that is valued for
its dramatic significance in any period of culture. It is these lapses,
continually engendered by the birth of "ignorant" children, which
renew the learning cycle associated with alternation through the other types.

Now in the case of the biological environment, Boulding points out that
"the
biosphere recycles its materials through all the organisms that comprise
it" (152,
p. S6). Examples are the nitrogen
cycle and the carbon dioxide-oxygen cycle.
But
he does not suggest, as his vision implies, that the noosphere could recycle
its
materials through the organizations (and other artifacts) which comprise
it. The
question is if it did, or rather does, what are those cycles and how do they
interweave? For it is then their
interweaving that provides the context for the
transformative, dialectical processes which are hopefully to be appropriately
contained.

The tragedy of the seven types of interaction is that they emerge as the
only
credible set of alternatives because of the binary valued logic which governs
their
generation (e.g. 3 species, each affected positively or negatively by the interaction,
or not at all). Such a limited set has
the twofold disadvantage of reinforcing the
conflictual logic of dialectics without strengthening and enriching the
non-dialectical context through which such transformative processes play
themselves out. (The "mutual
cooperation" type then merely functions as a "day of
rest" which evokes the dramatic opportunities of the other six.) They constitute a
self-limiting pattern.

If the number of basic distinctions made was greater (e.g. N = 20, for
example) a
much finer grained set of alternatives would emerge. These would provide a richer
ecology of interactions within which people and groups could develop. The finer the
grain the more probable it is that people would find that one or more such
interaction categories was specifically meaningful to their condition. The ability to
vary N would introduce a new degree of conceptual freedom. The problem is of
course to safeguard the integrity of each such set and relate it to others.

This suggests the need to elaborate a continuumce of patterns of which
the simplest
would correspond to the transformative diseqilibrium processes. The more complex
would correspond to the equilibrium processes based on a richer set of
interaction
types woven together by a variety of interlocking and mutual stabilizing cycles
through which alternation takes place.
This possibility is explored in Annex I. In
the light of Sheldrake's argument, the existence of such a range of patterns
should
make it easier to avoid learning not to learn within the current self-limiting
patterns. This should help to release
the potential for healthier human and social
development.

8.13 Language of probabilistic vision of the world

The Soviet statistician, V V Natimov, has recently completed a trilogy
of which the
third volume (160) constitutes a remarkable synthesis drawing on the entire
range
of knowledge (including elements of semantics, natural and social sciences,
mysticism, and the arts) in an effort to understand how the human mind perceives
the world. The methodology is borrowed
largely from physics (as capable of
tolerating paradoxes within its own theories), with considerable attention to
the
role of metaphor and the function of human imagination in capturing
manifestations
of consciousness and unconsciousness.
The primary ontological position is that the
world is an open one, the outcome of processes that are probabilistic in nature
and
constantly the domain of novelties and uncertainties. The language in which one
captures aspects of Reality is itself polymorphic, metaphorical, and
constrained_by
Godelian principles of undecidability.
Right and left hemisphere modes of
consciousness are, through links provided by the unconscious, capable of
functioning
along unusual circuits so that sequential processes become concurrent in real
time.

For Nalimov the "words, on which our culture is based, do not and cannot
have an atomistic meaning. It has become possible and even necessary to
consider words as possessing fuzzy semantic fields over which the probabilistic
distribution function is constructed and to consider people as probabilistic
receivers" (160, pp. 5-6). This leads him to ask whether taxa are
discrete, as is normally assumed in the various typologies through which the
world is perceived, especially in connection with human and social development.

"What we are considering is not merely the probabilistic vision
of the world stemming from its infinite complexity, but inwardly deterministic
"in fact". We mean the probabilistic world where probability lies
at the core of the world. We mean probabilistic ontology of the probabilistic
world, not probabilistic epistemology of a deterministic world" (160,
p. 6)

Acquaintance with taxonomy in various branches of knowledge leads him to
suggest the hypothesis that "taxa probabilistic by nature are neither
an exception to nor a result of deficiency in our cognition; they are the
rule and an immanent property of the world." (160, p. 7) Consequently
in the probabilistic world clear-cut boundaries and the absence of embarrassing
"transitional forms" merely testify to a reduction in completeness.

"We are accustomed to the idea that evolution means the appearance
of something absolutely new. The truly new thing is a new taxon or archetype.
But within the world of probabilistic taxa, archetypes, and individuals, evolution
may take another course: it suffices to redistribute probabilities. A rare
deviation becomes the norm, while the norm becomes an abnormality, an atavism.
6ut potentiality still exists....What we keep in mind is the constant potentiality
which underlies various probabilities of manifestation." (160, p. 8)

For Nalimov, culture is a deep collective consciousness whose roots lie in
the remotest part. It forms a fuzzy mozaic of concepts with the distribution
function of probabilities given over it. But real people have their own
individual probabilistic filters of perception which generate personal perception
of culture, again probabilistically given. The (Jungian) collective unconsciousness
is then related to low probability concepts. Groups in society with similar
filters then constitute clusters or psychic genotypes. In this probabilistic
sense man is never free being dominated by the past as stored in the
collective consciousness. But at the same time he is free because
the genotype does not rigidly determine the probabilistic structure of an
individual filter of perception; it only gives certain possibilities for
its formation (160, p. 9)

Nalimov stresses the continuous nature of consciousness, with which a person
is always in contact, but which cannot be reduced to the discreteness of language
(except partially through rhythmical texts). Phrases constructed over discrete
symbol-words are always interpreted at the continuous level. "The continuous
nature of everyday language finds its expression in the limitless divisibility
of the verbal meanings, while the continuous nature of the morphology of the
animate world is expressed by the impossibility of constructing a discrete
taxonomy." (160, p. 30)

This leads him to suggest that:

"Perhaps we should be more cautious and speak not of consciousness
of the world but of the semantic field of universal significance through which
the world we know as divided is restored in its wholeness. Is there any
other way to imagine the world in its integrality?" (160, p. 14)

The question is then what is the semantic field of the world. "How
can the fuzzy, probabilistically weighted vision of the world be combined
with formal logic, which we cannot afford to reject?" (160, pp. 1 5).
If one phenomenon can be explained by several scientific hypotheses, "there
is still a tendency to evaluate these hypotheses and to select the only true
one. If this cannot be done, the situation is evaluated as obviously unsatisfactory.
Is it possible to act otherwise, i.e., to perceive the phenomenon through
a field of hypotheses, without their discrimination...But shall we
be able to cope with this at the psychological Ivel: is our rnind ready
for this vision of the world?" (I 60, p. 1 6). And how is this field
to be conceived as being organized for comprehension?

Nalimov suggests that: "If all the taxa of our culture, despite their
uniqueness, are but various translations of our Text...and biological species
are various translations of another Text, then it is quite plausible that
they all are translations of one and the same Text." (160, p. 14).
The world is then seen as a text, and through texts accessible to consciousness
individuals interact with the world (160, p. 26). The question directly
relevant to human and social development is how such texts evolve.

Transformative evolution, according to Nalimov, results from the multiplicative
nature of the interaction between two probability distribution functions,
one corresponding to the Initial text and the second to a preference filter.
Then it is not the initial text but the filter which changes. Thus the progress
of science also consists effectively of the endless filtration of new ideas
through the filter of paradigmatic criteria carried by past conceptions -
filters which may be softened, rather than destroyed, when they prove inadequate.

Innovative development can then be seen as a response to a semantic vacuum.
"New texts are always a result of free creativity realized on a probabilistic
set which may be regarded as an unexposed semantic universe or nothing,
the semantic vacuum or, metaphorically, an analogue of the physical vacuum.
Here we deal with the problem of nothing which stimulated thinkers both in
the East...and in the West..." (160, p. 29)

Nalimov devotes three chapters to this question. Of special interest is
his concept of the way a person is defined for himself and others both through
the generation of discrete words or symbols and through their comprehension
at a continuous level. Both aspects are realized through contact with
the semantic field, which in physical terms can be described as emission and
absorption of semantic field quanta. But in the light of the Heisenberg
uncertainty relation, "semantic interaction between people...is possible
only as a consequence of semantic fuzziness of both the human psychic domain
and verbal semantics." (160, p. 76). Humans may however, interact with
the semantic vacuum through unobservable (virtual) vacuum manifestations:

"Just as any physical virtual particles of various types, very similar
processes go on in the psychic domain too. The latter may be described as
a constant fluctuation of the probability distribution function determining
a person's individuality on the semantic field. A human being never remains
frozen and unchanged." (160, p. 77)

Nalimov then reviews experiments in meditation, some of which were conducted
with his colleagues. In his terms such experiences

"may be reinterpreted as a ceaseless reconstruction of the distribution function
of probabilities determining a person's individuality....The keen interest
of modern Western man in meditation is easily understandable: the culture
of our time has squeezed human individuality, and the distribution function
determining personality is becoming needle-shaped. Meditation is a technique
that allows people to loosen this unbearably narrow__structure, to make it
fuzzy. (160, p. 138)

These considerations lead Nalimov to ask the question: "in what way can a possible
change in the metrics of the semantic space be interpreted?" (160, p. 287).
In the physical analogue changes of fundamental constants are thought to produce
another physical world. He sees the entire past, through the colonial period,
as involving an expansion of the life space. "In contrast, we see the new as
an expansion of the space for human existence - the entrance into new psychological
spaces. But is our consciousness mature enough not to pollute these new spaces?"
(160, p. 300). Such new spaces also call for a multidimensional concept of personality
which he explores (160, p. 287).

Of special interest in the light of the arguments of this paper is Nalimov's
view that the Aristotelian bimodal logic cannot be replaced by another one:

"The insufficiency of logic in everyday language is made up for by the use
of metaphors. The logic of the text and its metaphorical side are two mutually
complementary phenomena. And, to my mind, further evolution of linguistic
means should proceed by deepening language complementarity rather than by
searching for another kind of logic." (160, p. 281).

According to the complementarity principle, in order to reproduce an object
in its integrity it is necessary to alternate through a pattern of descriptions
of it in terms of mutually exclusive classes of concepts. This implies the use
of a "manifold of models generated by essentially different paradigms", but
Nalimov questions " whether people are prepared for this intentionally incomplete
vision of the world" (160, pp. 276 and 283). However, as has been argued earlier
in this paper:

"If it is typical of human reason to perceive the world through antinomies,
why not try to find a language in which these antinomies...would act as mutually
complementary principles." (160, p. 284)

Nalimov points out that:

"Clear-but conceptualization oppositions create the polarization
without which the passionate temperament of individuals that provides society
with its energy could not have been realized" (160, p. 294). Such
"passionarity" looks like an obsession and has dramatic consequences
when expressed collectively. But without it, persons or nations may lose
their energy. "We must acknowledge passionarity to be immanent to people.
A selective manifestation of the whole, man tends to discover the entrance
for the selectivity and thus acquires energy" (160, p. 295).

Again as argued in this paper, Nalimov sees the manifested semantic universe
as structured not by logic, but by number (160, p. 285). In this sense
he considers the probabilistic vision of the world to be a realization of
the dream of Pythagoras and Plotinus of describing the world in its integrity
and fuzziness through number, or through a "koan of numbers" (160,
p. 32-36). But despite an extensive review of Eastern and Western symbols
(including mandalas), he seems to limit his attention to numbers in their
probabilistic sense rather than extending it to include their configurative
geometrical sense, although Chladni patterns (164) might be considered a link
between the two. Whereas this paper stresses the possibility of using number-governed
configurations of complementary languages, symbols or metaphors to provide
a variety of learner-responsive ways of organizing comprehension of the semantic
universe and the possibilities of acting in it.

In the light of Nalimov's work it is possible to imagine configurations of
complementary languages as being organized as N-dimensional "semantic
Chladni patterns". These would probably only be comprehensible where
N was less than 4. Clearly when N was 2, these could resemble many of the
symbols discussed by Nalimov. With N equal to 2 or 3, they might resemble
the "macrons" examined by Ralph Abraham (165). And with N equal
to 3, there is the intriguing possibility that the stable configurations could
be conceived as resembling the organization of sets of electron orbits around
an atom. Such "atoms" might lend themselves to a Mendeleyev-type
periodic classification into what would then be a (developmental) sequence
of viable "learning manifolds", each with characteristics properties,
whether as a description of a multi-facetted personality, group, or society.